Articles

Creating the Visuals of Sly 2: Band of Thieves

This is hard to do when every element has the same level of detail, so Sucker Punch came up with the idea of determining detail by depth. Basically, the further into the background an object is, the more realistic it should be. On the other hand, things closer to the foreground should get more "graphic" or abstract. "Keeping the characters as flat as possible helps pop them off the interactive geometry. If everything was exactly the same, then there'd be no depth," Madan explains. "It's just from studying old cartoons, actually. You could always tell if a guy was climbing up a cliff, which rocks were going to fall off, because that gray in the rock was completely different from the background." Sucker Punch clearly understands the value of non-traditional educational curriculums.

Before the Beginning

Sucker Punch's artistic workflow seems to make sense, but a question arises: Where do all those cool Sly Cooper characters come from? The answer, for the most part, is Madan himself. "The bosses and all that stuff is usually done really early on, like before anyone even starts. ... I come in at the beginning and design all the bosses ... because that establishes how each level is going to feel from a directional standpoint."

This work is not done in a vacuum. "Generally speaking, I'll sit down with the designers and we'll talk about what we want to do. I'll come up with the locations and the bosses, because they're pretty much tied into each other. With India for example, the first thing that came to mind was a tiger." So the art team determines the game's locales too, eh? Madan doesn't beat around the bush: "It's my fault that they go to Canada."

It can be particularly difficult to design a lead character. "Two paintings were done before Sly 1 -- he looked like Jojo the Raccoon from Rocket [Sucker Punch's first game, for the Nintendo 64]. There were many iterations. [It was] a four or five-month process." And it's in character design, more than anything, where it's nearly impossible to please everyone. "America wanted him cool, Japan wanted him cute, and Europe wanted him edgy. Which is why I have five drawers of drawings." Despite all the difficulty, Sucker Punch believes it ended up with a cool-looking, widely appealing character ... and with nary hint of creativity-diluting focus-grouping involved.

But enough about raccoons.

The Concept Art

Travis Kotzebue is one of Sucker Punch's concept artists, and it's he and his colleagues that get the first real crack at visualizing a game's locations. "I start doing rough thumbnails based on found photographs, just play with basic shapes, elevation, and things like that. So they [the designers] have a feel for what we want to do. This is before getting into detail for architecture and things like that. It's more just visual stuff; shapes, height, space, things like that." Kotzebue and his fellow artists continually share their drawings with the game designers, who use it for inspiration as they start to "block out" early level designs.